NATURAL ENGAGEMENTS AND ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS ...

y employing the continuous infixes –ju- or –ra-, respectively). Not only does this sound more
natural in English but it also more accurately captures the aspectually durative nature of the action
which is evident from context but is not marked by verbal inflection (cf. Nuckolls 1996: 44).
I do not always transcribe a given word in the same way twice. The idea that a given word
in a language corresponds to a specific object and that, furthermore, that word-object relation has
an equivalent in another language, is a fallacy of naïve realism (see Chapter Two). Many Quichua
words refer to a range of meanings that are best captured by more than one word in English. I try
to give a sense of this –where I feel it is appropriate– by using different words to translate a given
Quichua term or phrase if it occurs repeatedly.
Speakers consciously use glottal stops, vowel elongations, and suppressed word parts.
When possible and appropriate, I try to give a sense of how these affect speech style by incorpo-
rating them in the English version.
I translate questions in Quichua with a question mark -“?”. However, I do not use this
sign in the original. Questions in Quichua are often marked using suffixes and the intonation pat-
tern is often quite different from the English; a use of the question mark in the original text might
be misleading and, accordingly, I avoid it.
I generally do not translate phatic interjections. The following are some that occur most
frequently: chi or chai (there), ye or ya, from yanga, similar to “no way” in English, hm or mhm,
similar to the English equivalents, and áha (really?).
I use brackets to add information necessary for understanding the passage that would be
clear to Quichua-speaking listeners familiar with the context of the material being presented. I
also use brackets to indicate some of my own commentaries (e.g., [meaning unclear]) or to
unpack the meanings of terms that have no straightforward translation and are repeated in bold in
the English version.
A question mark in parenthesis –(?)– indicates that I am unsure of my translation.
I have tried to make these translations as accurate as possible. In many cases my inter-
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